Topic

Glitch Companion 3.7

Original post (see updates below):
It all started with this idea.
I wanted quick shortcuts, so I decided to make a small script with Autohotkey.
It's a noob-like program language for non-devs like me :]
Then while I had that app running, I thought I totally could add additional tools and a nice GUI.
So I bundled other ideas from me or from the forums in three tabs, and a Glitch Companion.

It appears as an always-on-top widget, that you can move where you like over the game screen.
Here is how it fits in 1680x1050, you can probably place it over the chat in smaller resolutions.
This is a desktop app, and will not work with Mac os. It works with some limitations on Linux through Wine.
You can launch it from the source script if you feel paranoid and have Autohotkey 1.1+ installed,
or directly from the executable.
This is a standalone app, it's not for your browser
Requirements: Windows Xp or above or Linux with Wine

Replies

Keyboard Shortcuts:
When activated, each letter key on your keyboard (except WASD,B,F,L,M) will send [Enter], the Delay, and the letter key
To squeeze a chicken for example just press Q. (see the underlined letter in item menus for all actions)
Don't forget to disable them when entering the chat, or you may get some surprises!

Screen1: live mini-map / GPS
A 300x180 view of the area map, centered on your live position
Thanks who everyone who helped on that thread!
Use the 1,2,3 buttons to switch street, trail, and resource overlays
The globe button will popup the full map

Screen2: street resource list / detector
With this one you don't have to read or even remember the loading screen
The list will be available whenever you need it
A little search box on the top can keep track of what you're looking for, and as you enter a street with
that resource, a reminder will popup on the screen
If you still can't find it, the search icon will launch a global search for you on Zog tools

Screen3: travel book / street bookmarks
Here you can save all your favorite, and most glitchiest streets you come to encounter in the worlds of Ur.
The street preview come along with an assignable icon, and a notebook area for personal notes and details that you may want to remember about each place.
Unlike the "teleport" menu, you get unlimited space for your needs.
Each bookmark is accessible later to get you to destination.

Screen4: links to API tools / notes / snapshot
Various links to online tools for Glitch
Some of them use directly your Profile Id, or the item you're looking for in the street tab
And a notepad area to keep track of your current mood, business, listings...
More info about the snapshot tools here

Settings Panel:
The timer is set to 10sec (10000msec) between each position check
It should be perfectly fine already, as the loading screen is almost that long for each street
Delay (200ms) is for the keyboard shortcuts, it's the time for the item-menu to load before you can select an action
You may have to tweak this one slightly depending of your computer
To edit the hotkeys you can have a look here for the complete listing
The mask and line colors use Hex format with alpha, you can pick one color here

Thanks!
Well I may do something later to change the hotkeys easily if you guys really need it :]
That tab shorcut is very secondary though, I rarely use it
In the meantime, if you install Autohotkey you can edit the script with Notepad, it's quite easy

And yeah, again it's a desktop app for windows, it's not a browser thing sry

@Anderella I replaced the archive with a (slightly larger) zip one, probably easier now for everyone
@Glitches Thx ! Actually I sorta had more fun doing this, than I had playing Glitch lately. It's just more interesting when you can create something. Hopefully that is about to change with the incoming house & design features and other stuff :]

Well I would rather use the enter key directly if that was the case :p
It's just like I wrote above:
"When activated, each letter key on your keyboard (except F,L,M) will send [Enter], the Delay, and the letter key"

You know you can already use [n] for nibble after enter instead of the arrow keys, right?

I rarely post on those forums, I guess I'm just cutting out the technical discussion,
and just sharing with the people that are actually gonna use it here :]
But of course if you see any improvement (or idea) possible with the script, feel free to tell me about it!
That's AHK-L indeed

Lemo, that's an awesome app. However, there is one bug that annoys me. Basically, with this running, Caps Lock doesn't work! I've dabbled around with AHK, so I've determined the problem is that you're not detecting caps lock being on, so with caps on or off, it always sends the lowercase letter, since you're hotkeys being bound to each letter are always sending the lowercase. I'm not too good with AHK, so I couldn't figure out a solution (besides me just deleting the code that does the keys on/off, since I never use that. obviously though, that's not a proper fix). I tried doing a getKeyState, but that only detects when the key is being HELD, not when it's on. Though caps lock isn't used much, it's still something that some use occasionally. Not a HUGE bug, but if you're looking for something to fix, that could be good! :D

EDIT: I made a fix! dl.dropbox.com/u/19510731/G... Now caps works properly, and I added a couple other things. First, if you do Control-R, it will re-download the Map file, in case of changes to the area. I also did a few graphics tweaks, for my liking. I've repackaged it, and you can take a look at the source in the .ahk. If you don't like my graphics tweaks, feel free to change them. If you want to incorporate any/all of my tweaks, I give you full permission too!

@Mocha Hey thx, I appreciate that kind of collaborative help!
Not sure LOTS of people use caps lock to play Glitch (or maybe they use it for the chat, after deactivating the keys), but I guess it doesn't hurt to be all-terrain :]

I'll have look later at reassignable shortcuts, and I'll add it at that time
You probably noticed that this part of the code is quite annoying to edit for each key ;)
Apparently it's possible to assign new shortcuts on the fly, see the first example down this page
I'll try something more compact, with a loop and a hotkeys settings file

The reload function is a good idea!
Actually, with the upcoming "augmented" map, I plan to update it every time you launch the app to have the updated resources

About the graphics, did you change anything else, beside the rounded corners?
I updated the links in my first post, so people can have the choice easily

@lalalakurasaki lol of course it didn't
Still couldn't figure out if you're actually testing the app here, but if you have issues with the hotkeys/menu, you can try to set a higher delay, if the menu hasn't got the time to show up
The [l]etter shortcut has no effect before the drop down menu is loaded

So, you'll notice when you first open up the folder, there are less files now. The biggest benefit is that now it downloads the Map.ini on every run (I have it set to my Dropbox right now, but obviously, you can change it), and will download Settings.ini ONLY if it isn't there. The settings.ini downloaded now has a default player value of FILLME. When you first launch the companion (or any time the value is FILLME), it will ask you to put it in your ID, then it will write it to the ini, and restart. This makes it a bit easier for the less technically-inclined to get started with this ;)

I made the map.ini download every time, since streets will change, and instead of having to release a new release every time there's a map update, you can just change the ini, upload it, and everyone will get the update.

For the small stuff, there's now a loading splash when you first run (just so people know it's doing something when it's downloading the extra things), and there's no longer a Taskbar entry. (since it's always on top, we don't really need it. It's still in the little icons part of the taskbar though) And probably something else I've forgot... ;)

Great ideas ^^
I have uploaded Map.ini to the wiki, this way everyone can update it anytime ;)
Here are the links to the page, and to the actual file to retrieve: Map.ini
Not sure it's really necessary for the settings file though

About the id, good one again, maybe we can add a button to open the profile there
I wish there was a way to get it automatically
Too bad URLDownloadToFile doesn't act as if you were logged in like with your actual browser

I think the loading is a bit short to have a loading splash there, I'm just getting a blink of it even on my "ancient" computer. One thing to change though could be the (10s) timer, because I haven't found a way not to apply it first when the app start
The taskbar removal also crossed my mind at some point, thx for thinking about it :]

Yeah, we really don't need the settings.ini, I just kept messing mine up so much when testing, it was nice to quickly get a fresh start. xD Great idea to host on the wiki though, since then people can edit it together!

I actually just got an idea for getting the ID automatically, and I will post here with a test soon. :D

I also added the loading splash, since when I would test, though it really would just be there for a second, it's one of those things where it's nice to confirm to the user they launched it. I just sort of did it for the look.

EDIT: Darn. For automatically getting the ID, I got as far as the point as getting my ID, but it would only get mine, since you have to implicitly specify a token, and each token only gets one person. Unless there's SOME way we could 1) open a page in a browser to ask for identity permissions 2) record the token somewhere that AHK could download it from 3) somehow get AHK to check that they've confirmed, and write it somewhere, we'd just have to ask the player to copy and paste their ID in manually.

Yeah it didn't seem possible from my attempts either
I think the more user friendly we can get is to ask for the user name in that first launch window
Then go URLDownloadToFile, glitch.com/search/?q=%input% and grab the first result url

I was using Glitch Companion yesterday, very happy with how it was working, and really loving the hot keys, when I thought I would add a quick comment to global chat. I have to admit that I am a terrible typist, and look at my keys when I type, so I didn't realize that I was creating a situation where only one keystroke was posting at a time, causing Global to scroll like crazy. Once I saw what was happening, I immediately turned the hot keys off, and apologized to Global, and I haven't turned the hot keys back on since, but it was not enough to keep people from submitting a complaint about my "spamming" the chat. It was not a happy feeling to get a finger-wagging in my email.

The worst part to me was how quickly I must have been reported - there was only seconds between when I started having the typing problems and when I realized what was going on and apologized for doing it. There must be some very enthusiastic complainers out there.

Anyway, the moral to this story is: don't use the hot key feature if you like to chat.

Jewel - yikes, sorry about that. The reason that happens is because with keys on, it sends a fake enter key, then the letter you pressed. Maybe we should add a dialog when you turn on keys, to warn you not to chat. Again, super sorry! :(

Yeah sorry for that :\
At some point I used the [tab] key to enable/disable the hotkeys, because it's the same that gets you to the chat panel in-game
But that was kinda puzzling sometimes

Anyway, the hotkey part is the most "fake" thing of this app, as Mocha said, and that's really something I'd like to see natively available in Glitch
So don't forget to cast your vote over here if you like hotkeys

The new version of the Glitch Companion is now available for downloadPreview
New features
-Trail display and resource overlay (collaborative work with Janitch)
Powered by Glitch Atlas, you now get a realtime view of the resources surrounding your current position. You can choose what kind of item you want to display to focus on specific resources.
The "trail mode" records and displays on the map the path you traveled in that game session. It can help you to harvest more efficiently, or for completist achievements for example.

-Customize everything! (starting from the request by Circe)
I finally added a "user friendly" (but kinda crowded) settings panel. You can access it from the Glitchcom logo on the tools tab, and everything will be updated without having to reload the app.

-First launch and graphical tweaks (ideas from Mocha)
You're now asked for your user name, instead of the profile Id, with a lil avatar preview to check the result.
The window feels more "borderless" and now integrates better on top of the game screen

Minor updates
-Full map (with the overlay goodies) available in a popup
-Hotkeys will only work inside the game screen (when the "Game | Glitch" window is active)
You can now type notes or google something without deactivating the keys
I removed WASD from the shortcuts coz I remembered people actually may use that to move (hehe sry)
-Housing streets and subway stations are now fine with the minimap

I updated the download in the first post and the quick guide
Go try it and tell me what you think (:

Ha! a comment thanks ^^
I'm glad you did the test with Linux, I was sorta wondering if this could work
Out of curiosity what part is working fine?

I'm not calling any other app, but maybe that could be an issue with gdi+
That's the graphical library present in Windows, I'm calling it to draw the maps
I don't know if wine support that one well, you could try getting the gdiplus.dll on that page

I did my best with the Quick Guide above in the second post,
So if you have any specific howto question go ahead :]
Hopefully there will be a greasemonkey version later for all browsers

Thanks for the report mike
Actually I had a few typing "gaps" sometimes as well, but I guess I needed users feedback to start thinking about fixing it ;)
Does it eat "all" your letters, or just write something like "cmaponion" instead of "companion" from times to times?
The 2.0 version used to launch the hotkey, then check if it should continue or just "type", and I think the problem happens when it tries to handle a hotkey and check the player position at the same time...

Anyway :]
I just find another way to deactivate those at the source, tell me if it's better now with:Glitch Companion 2.1
(You can keep your 2.0 settings if you like and replace just Glitchcom.exe/.ahk)

@Bashere Yup sorry it won't work with Mac Os or Linux as stated above :\